jart unfortunately seems to have had some kind of a mental breakdown involving a hard rightward religious/political pivot around June according to their latest twitter and github activity. They most recently posted a video of the police breaking down their bedroom door. Very sad to see

Jart had a hard rightward pivot shortly after occupy Wall Street where they were advocating for forming militias and pushing for Eric Schmidt for dictator. Obviously they're tremendously talented but they've always been kooky verging on unwell.

The richest people in the world sure are lucky to have good people like you out here fighting to protect their rights

What hyperbolic nonsense, just because something doesn't affect me doesn't mean it can't be bad policy. Wealth taxes are a fool's errand and serve only to damage and slow the economy.

The implication in the book is that the exploitation enabled by AI in their history was somehow even worse.

During the Butlerian Jihad, the people involved in it didn't know that ten thousand years of slavery would be what they are choosing, so we don't know how bad it actually was.

The way Jihad presented in the oblique references in books, anyway, it sounds a great deal like a fanatical fundamentalist religious movement to me. Those are not known for their fine reasoning.

I’ve gotta say ultimately I’m not convinced Herb put more thought into it beyond its purpose justifying human labour in his universe despite the massively advanced technology. There’s a similar shortcut in the Warhammer backstory.

Herbert did genuinely believe that people overly relying on machines is problematic insofar as it "trains the mind" to think like a machine, and in the process loses the indeterminacy that he believed to be an inherent and valuable trait of human thinking that machines cannot replicate.

(Coincidentally, this is also the main threat in the original books, just manifesting in a different form, with prescient individuals "locking in" the rest of humanity.)

There are ethical and environmental concerns arising simply from use and contribution to the industry which many people take seriously

AUR is an effectively unmoderated user repo. It’s not Arch Linux’s core repository, nor is it enabled by default or indeed even possible to use without manual downloads from outside the package manager.

There's still a security there though.

You have confidence you are actually downloading the same foo as everyone else. And if there were an issue there would be pushback. Not so if you get some random exe from warez.com

Yes it isn't perfect, it's still a lot better than windows land.